Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Box 22.2 continued
projects. One large example is the reclamation of land
alongside the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal to create
the Waterlinks Business Village, with 750 new jobs in
offices and clean industries. Alongside another of the
area's canals, the Grand Union, 40 hectares of derelict
land has been reclaimed to build Bordesley, an urban
village with over 1000 houses, a school and other
community facilities
Other major developments on derelict or vacant land
in the area include the development of the Fort Shopping
Park and the 'Star' site dose to the M6/A38M motorway
interchange. This latter site of 14 hectares, previously the
location of a power station, has now been reclaimed with
the help of a £6.8 million grant from the development
corporation and is set to become a leisure and
entertainment centre with one of the largest cinema
complexes in Europe. A key element in making all these
developments possible has been the construction of a new
6 km dual-carriageway spine road through the area.
The Birmingham Heartlands Development Corporation
has been involved in many activities, but one of its central
and largest concerns has been to bring land and buildings
into effective use. In the four financial years 1993/94-
1996/97 it reclaimed more than 115 hectares of land, and
the acquisition and reclamation of land have accounted
for between half and three-quarters of its budget in most
years. In the space of a generation, this part of
Birmingham has been transformed from a mix of
traditional manufacturing industries and utilities in decline,
through various stages of dereliction and decay to a
situation today where new activities and new environments
are creating a post-industrial future for the area. It is clear
that problems remain: deprivation and social disadvantage
have not been entirely overcome; parts of the environment
are still unattractive; and the area is most unlikely to
provide as many jobs as it did in its heyday, but it is equally
clear that a major turnaround has been achieved, and
investment is now being attracted back into what was
effectively an economic no-go area just ten years ago.
included recreation, public open space and
agriculture/forestry.
interrelationship between changing economic and
social forces and resulting land use patterns.
A further point of contact for geographers
comes through the role of planners. Many planners
started out as geographers (and a few
vice versa),
and for the most part they speak the same
language and use some of the same tools. Many
geographers have worked closely with planners
and have influenced the formulation of land
policy through debate or through commissioned,
and highly applied, research. A final point to be
noted is the contribution that geographical tools
and methods make to an understanding of derelict,
vacant and contaminated land. In particular, the
techniques of GIS are increasingly providing
powerful and flexible ways of collecting, storing
and analysing information relating to land quality.
The debates about the end use of derelict and
vacant land have recently shifted as planners and
politicians grapple with the problem of where to
accommodate Britain's projected growth of new
housing. Controversial estimates of new housing
needs for the next twenty years have recently been
raised from 4.25 million to 5 million, a figure that
is approximately equivalent to the present housing
stock of Greater London, plus Greater Manchester,
plus the whole of Wales. There is pressure from
CONCLUSION AND PROSPECTIVE VIEW
Questions relating to the use and misuse of land
are particularly pressing in the United Kingdom
in view of the density of the population and the
changing land-use needs that must be
accommodated upon a small surface area. Over the
years, the geographical connections and
contributions to this debate have been substantial.
An important starting point was the publication
of
Applied Geography
(Stamp 1960), a work that
combined the themes of land use and abuse
referred to in this chapter, and the present topic's
broader theme of applied geography.
Geography has contributed greatly to an
understanding of the spatial pattern of dereliction
and the way in which this relates to contemporary
land needs. Not only are there regional
concentrations of derelict, vacant or contaminated
land but there are also marked differences between
urban and rural conditions and between inner and
outer urban localities. Such land cannot be seen in
isolation, for it is clearly one part of a complex
